no money - go looting © Lilly Schwartz 2011

The area where we live now is supposedly not a good one. You don’t see any organic supermarkets, no cool shops, nothing expensive. Instead you have many kebab shops, cheap stores, internet cafés and casinos. Just like in the area where I lived before. I don’t mind it at all. In fact I prefer this international flair of borderline poverty to the artificial coolness of a “hip area” where you only see young muesli eating families. In Brighton they call one area “muesli mountain” and it’s precisely like that. Cool people pretending to be on a hippie trip. This area here seems more real. People have problems here and you see these “badly integrated migrant teenagers” roaming the streets. Seriously, they don’t even seem dangerous or as if they’re up to something. They just seem to have nowhere else to go.

There is an attitude that goes beyond that: “The government has done nothing for us, we just do the same”, but I don’t think everyone perceives it like this. On the subway I overheard a young migrant boy saying to his friend “I don’t get my dad, he’s so lazy, he hasn’t worked in years. If it wasn’t for the German system we would have nothing”. The other day when roaming the streets myself, I saw the poster on this stall encouraging looting if you don’t have money. However, I doubt that there is much space to actually do something like this around here. If you live in this area, it’s likely that one of your friends or cousins works in one of these stores that you could loot, so why would you do that? Might be that most of these kids are not going to be doctors or lawyers, but I think that the media overstates the case a bit when they talk about a “problem area”. It’s like the area where I lived before. You can either live peacefully in one of the backyards or side streets, or you can end up in a house where the police comes every week. And I don’t think this is going to be a problem in our house.

And for me it’s actually great: grocery stores sell gummibears 10 cents cheaper, since people around here are on a budget!